The present invention relates to a method of populating a collaborative workspace and a system for providing a collaborative workspace.
The use of electronic communications and digital documents is pervasive in today's information age. The emergence of electronic data communication has enabled organisations to go both virtual and global. Employees, vendors, and partners alike can work closely together or collaborate on projects without being constrained by physical or geographical boundaries. Collaborative software applications such as IBM Lotus Quickplace™ and Microsoft Sharepoint Team Services™ have been created to facilitate such collaboration activities that revolve around communications, information and documents sharing, and coordination of activities and events between groups of individuals. Such applications typically include tools to coordinate information-sharing e.g. use of shared folders), communications (e.g. threaded discussions forums), team management (e.g. contacts and tasks) and event management (e.g. calendars) related to a project.
However, despite its availability, such collaborative applications have not gained widespread use. This can be attributed to the fact that prior art for collaborative applications have focused primarily on the collaboration technology (faster response, more product features, support more simultaneous users) but such applications are tedious to set-up.
For example, a collaborative application for setting up a group workspace conventionally requires the following pre-collaboration set-up to be performed by a workspace initiator before any collaboration activity can begin:                (a) Create Workspace,        (b) Add Members, assign rights, and send invitations (usually via e-mail),        (c) Upload File/Documents,        (d) Send Discussions and        (e) Initialize Calendar.        
Upon completion of these steps, the workspace initiator must then wait for each invited member to:                (f) Read e-mail invitation,        (g) Accept Invitation,        (h) Navigate to collaboration site,        (i) Successfully download and install any software if required, and finally        (j) Login and Participate.        
While such steps may be considered the “norm” as they are virtually standard requirements in collaborative groupware workspace applications, they incur the drawback of high-overheads since pre-meditated set-up is required before the first collaboration action can occur through the workspace applications.
The above steps are onerous especially when compared to the normal work practice of communicating and sharing information through electronic mail (or e-mail), and thus it has been proposed to adapt known collaborative applications to work with e-mail applications to reduce the set-up time. For example, Sharepoint™ enables users to collaborate on files attached to Microsoft Outlook™ by creating workspaces based on the file attachment. However, this is inflexible and has its limitations.
Further, the use of e-mails as a collaborative tool has further problems since e-mails are designed as a simple store-and-forward messaging system. A first drawback is spam e-mails, or the predominance of “junk” mails in one's electronic inbox, which is a major contributor to information overload in e-mail systems. To resolve this, a typical solution involves the implementation of spam filters that detects spam e-mail characteristics, based either on user feedback, content analysis, Bayesian computations, or lists of email addresses or domains where emails originating from any member of these lists are always permitted through (so-called “white lists”) or always blocked (so-called “black lists”). However, prior art solutions do not address the problem of “occupational spam”, or useless e-mails from trusted parties. Examples include e-mails containing jokes from colleagues and friends, as well as the non-judicious excessive abuse of the “CC” feature in e-mail. Such e-mails are generally ignored by conventional spam filters, for fear of generating “false rejects”. This drawback is significant, as occupational spam has been estimated to be a significant proportion of total corporate e-mail.
A second drawback of using e-mail as a collaboration tool is the lack of structure and context in the user interface to facilitate collaboration activities such as finding names of participants to a workgroup, documents, projects and timelines. Typical e-mail interfaces (for e.g. Microsoft Outlook™ and Lotus™ from IBM) are designed primarily for convenient viewing of incoming e-mails rather than for collaboration purposes and thus have their limitations.
Prior art for e-mail retrieval also involves the use of freetext search, such as Gmail by Google. However, freetext search does not directly support the type of structured search frequently needed for group collaboration, such as “What are my meetings for next week?” or “Who is attending today's meeting and has not yet read the design document?”.
As it is appreciated, both conventional workspace collaborative applications and use of e-mail systems as a collaborative tool have their limitations and thus, there is a need for a new system that addresses the drawbacks highlighted above.